SUSS evoke the blistering days and chilly nights of an American desert. Their take on “ambient country,” a term they apparently coined, is elegant, luxurious, and teeming with technology—less like actually living in the Mojave than watching a time-lapse of the sky dappling its mesas and buttes. The New York trio leans hard into these imagined environs: A 2022 self-titled album featured songs titled “Gallup, NM” and “Needles, CA,” communities along Route 66 that the group’s members knew mostly from the vantage of the tour van. If the cowboy shtick sounds like cosplay, it disguises an equally prominent Downtown sensibility: SUSS, once a quartet with synth wizard Gary Leib before his unexpected death in 2021, weave their sound with a legacy of improvisation that has as much to do with the genre experiments of the Kitchen and the ’90s Knitting Factory as, say, the Grand Ole Opry. The potentially straw-thin gimmickry of “ambient country” is a vessel for urban yearnings, daydreams of pastoral life conjured up in the confinement of the metropolis.
It helps that the band, which now comprises pedal steel player Jonathan Gregg and multi-instrumentalists Bob Holmes and Pat Irwin (onetime guitarist for the B-52’s), emerged during the final years of the last decade, both an efflorescent period for ambient music and a moment when country was becoming more palatable to a wider variety of listeners. SUSS highlight a big-sky sweep that informed the former genre throughout its history: Pedal steel set a tone on Brian Eno’s scene-defining 1983 record Apollo, resurfaced on the KLF’s 1990 game-changer Chill Out, and took centerstage on Bruce Kaphan’s underknown 2001 record Slider, a focal point for the seemingly walleyed convergence of new age and Americana. SUSS’s 2018 debut, Ghost Box, may not have forged an original style, but it drew a bright red circle around ambient aesthetics that had always hidden in plain sight. Sometimes, putting a name to the unnameable is what innovation is all about.
Their new album, Birds & Beasts, takes the time-lapse metaphor to its extreme. The record seems to deal in eons, in the slow progression of ecology—the movements of fauna and the death and rebirth of flora. One can feel millennia pass in this record. The songs are wordless, aside from some muffled speech samples, so the only clues to their themes are SUSS’ highly suggestive song titles—“Migration,” for example, or “Overstory,” which brings to mind a verdant, thick canopy in a part of the world that has since become dusty and arid. (Not to mention novelist Richard Powers’ 2018 lament for the death of trees.) Many of the tunes are based around sighing keys, piano, and pedal steel, but “Restless” and “Flight” forefront finger-picked guitar rhythms, the sound of a small animal scurrying across a huge landscape.
The interplay between wide, somber space and the staccato optimism of enduring life makes for the most thoughtfully structured record of SUSS’s career. Birds & Beasts doesn’t necessarily surprise, but it crystallizes this band’s essence, particularly as they find their footing after the shocking loss of Leib. These seven tracks are full of delicate balances, so immaculately produced that supple details assume their own life—the way that the guitar melody barely floats on the surface of “Restless,” for example, or how Gregg’s pedal steel seems to shift its direction in the middle of the song, as though the band just reversed the current of a river.
The only cut to feature their late bandmate is “Migration,” which has kicked around in the SUSS songbook for years before ending up as this album’s closer. The most maximal composition in an understated set, “Migration”—like “Restless” and “Flight”—is sewn by thin stitches of guitar, diaphanous parts that keep this patchwork whole. Meanwhile, Holmes’ harmonica offers a sense of yearning, a train whistle heard in a one-horse town.
Such connotations bring with them all of the postmodern weight and irony accrued since America developed a vocabulary for describing the culture (one-horse!) of its sprawling heartland. Ditto the song’s buried vocal loops, most of them inaudible, although we can hear a male voice say, “Finally, they believed that they had the answers,” a self-serious exclamation that fizzles out like a distant radio signal. We begin the album with an image of the migratory patterns of the titular birds and beasts, and end thinking about humanity as it zooms forth so quickly that the world-expanding achievements of yesteryear become quaint, bits of modern archaeology familiar enough that they have become part of our species’ natural habitat.
SUSS revel in slippery distinctions between the manmade and the organic, the way that a synthesizer can sound indistinguishable from an acoustic instrument in the right hands. Their latest, though, puts human achievement in context—our entire civilization, this searching, glacial music seems to tell us, is merely a blip at the tail end of a slow evolution. Or, in other words: Birds & Beasts offers the revelation of a cross-country road trip, when the towns fall away and the land becomes grander, when people begin to feel as small as they actually are.
